With the postseason officially around the corner and teams jockeying for position, it's time for another edition of the NBA mailbag.
Throughout the NBA season, I will be answering your questions about the latest, most interesting topics in basketball. You can tweet me directly at @kpelton, tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
This week's edition of the NBA mailbag includes:
The significance of limited minutes for the Brooklyn Nets' big three
Is Trae Young a better shooter from deeper?
What's the meaning of the Blazers generating few easy looks?
Are there fewer OT games?
"How concerned should we be about the Nets' three stars playing so few minutes together before the playoffs?"
-- Jim M., Truth or Consequences, N.M.
With James Harden still sidelined following a setback in his rehab from a hamstring strain, it's not clear we're going to see him play with Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving again before the start of the playoffs, which might not mean adding to their total of 186 minutes played together so far since the deal for Harden.
Even sub-combos with two of the three stars haven't necessarily gotten much action. Because their absences occurred at different times, Durant and Harden have shared the court for just 268 minutes all season, or less than six full games.
Elias Sports Bureau research found that the seven total games all three Brooklyn stars have played in together would be the fewest during a regular season for a championship team's top three scorers, with only the 2000-01 Los Angeles Lakers (Kobe Bryant, Derek Fisher and Shaquille O'Neal played 10 games together) being in the ballpark. But there was a big difference between that Lakers team, which had seen those three core players together for four previous seasons, including the 2000 title run, and this Nets one built on the fly.
The better comparisons are to other championship contenders who made midseason trades. The 1994-95 Houston Rockets added Clyde Drexler at the trade deadline and remade their starting lineup, shifting Robert Horry from small forward to power forward on the fly. And the 2003-04 Detroit Pistons added Rasheed Wallace at the deadline, completing a starting five that would reach the next two NBA Finals.
Still, those teams had a lot more continuity than a Brooklyn club that retains just two players (Joe Harris and Spencer Dinwiddie, the latter working back from an ACL injury) from the group that made the 2019 playoffs.
I will say I don't find the arguments that the Nets are following in the path of last year's LA Clippers persuasive. Actually, the Clippers probably had a lot more time together than Brooklyn. Stars Paul George and Kawhi Leonard played 37 games and 890 minutes and the five-man starting lineup the Clippers used after acquiring Marcus Morris Sr. at the trade deadline still played nearly as many minutes (147) as the Nets' big three has. And that's to say nothing of the bubble-related circumstances, like Montrezl Harrell's seven-day quarantine upon return, that won't carry over this season.
Ultimately, I think the Nets' situation is unique, making it difficult to draw from past history when predicting how they will fare in the playoffs.
"Is Trae Young a better shooter from farther away from the hoop?"
-- r/AtlantaHawks
This question stems from my discussion of the Hawks on the Lowe Post last week. When Zach pointed out that Young is taking fewer 3-pointers this season (6.4 per game, down from 9.5 in 2019-20, while his 2-point attempts remain unchanged), I mentioned that didn't concern me because many of Young's deeper 3-point attempts are valuable solely because of the threat those deep shots create rather than their actual efficiency.
In response, u/Hawks264275 pointed out that according to play-by-play stats, Young shows up as a highly accurate shooter from logo range, having made 41% of his shots from between 28 and 40 feet when last-second shots are filtered out using pbpstats.com. However, there's a concern that play-by-play stats might not record distances (done manually) the same way on makes and misses, an effect Seth Partnow of The Athletic has noted on shot types tracked manually in the play-by-play.
Digging into the Second Spectrum tracking data confirms that notion and reveals an interesting split. On shots off the dribble, distance does seem to be an issue for Young. He's attempted 138 3s that are not marked as catch-and-shoots from between 28 and 40 feet this season, the second-most in the NBA behind Damian Lillard, making those at just a 33% clip. These are the marginal shot attempts I was thinking of when I made my comment. Inside 28 feet, Young's accuracy on these shots has gone up to 40%.
When it comes to catch-and-shoot attempts, the story is different. Young doesn't take many catch-and-shoot 3s in general (they account for just 23% of his shot attempts, fifth-lowest in the league) but staying a step or two beyond the 3-point line has had little impact. Young is making 35% of his catch-and-shoot attempts from 28 to 40 feet, not much worse than his 37.5% shooting inside 28 feet on catch-and-shoots. After accounting for the value of forcing defenders to play farther out, I think Young is better off spotting up deep. But the counterintuitive idea that he's a more accurate shooter from deep doesn't seem to bear out.
@kpelton Hi Kevin. I don't know how the mailbag works but I have a question anyway.
— Mookie Alexander (@mookiealexander) April 27, 2021
Do the Portland Trail Blazers run the most difficult looking offense in the NBA? This would entail lack of open shooters, iso heaviness, and general shot selection.
The short answer is yes. In each of these categories, the Blazers rank near the bottom (or top in isolation rate) in the NBA. Let's start with the percentage of shots outside 10 feet with no defender closer than four feet:
According to Synergy Sports tracking on NBA Advanced Stats, Portland is No. 2 in isolation rate:
And let's wrap with overall shot quality using Second Spectrum's quantified shot quality (qSQ) measure, which estimates the effective field-goal percentage an average shooter would produce on the same shots given location, type and distance of nearby defenders:
There's something important to note here: A lot of the teams near the Blazers are (like them) among the very best offensive teams in the league. The Clippers, for example, get a few more open shots (they're 19th on a rate basis) but also run a heavy number of isolations, as do the Nets. And the Clippers are next on the list in terms of lowest shot quality.
The Clippers also currently boast the highest offensive rating in NBA history (in large part because the league average is so much higher than years past). No coach sets out to run an offense that doesn't generate open looks or features low-quality shots, but they do play to the strengths of their stars, who often tend to excel at hitting shots that would be bad for the average player.
A lack of easy opportunities certainly makes life more difficult, particularly when the star is struggling as we saw last week with Lillard dealing with nagging injuries. But in general, shot making is a lot more important than shot quality in the NBA.
"I have the feeling that fewer and fewer games are decided in OT. Have you got the data to confirm it? And if so, to what extent has the explosion of the 3-pointer had an influence (the league being more make-or-miss and teams losing by two trying to make a 3 instead of trying to tie it)?"
-- Alvaro, Spain
This turned out to be a more interesting question than I expected. First: Yes, OT rates are down a bit from their peak during the '00s. Four of the last five seasons have dipped below the average rate since the NBA-ABA merger in 1976-77, shown here by the dashed line.
However, the influence of the 3-pointer on overtime games is more complex. There are two counteracting trends at play. Yes, there's naturally a strong relationship between the average margin by which games are decided and how often they go to overtime. (Variation in margin explains about 30% of the variation in overtime rates from season to season.) And this season's average margin (12.1 ppg in favor of the winning team) is the second-highest in NBA history, surpassed only by 1971-72 when the league was top-heavy after rapid expansion -- presumably in part because of the strong influence of 3-point shot making.
After accounting for that effect, more 3s clearly seem to result in more overtimes, presumably because of the opposite of the scenario you describe: what happens when a team is down three in the final seconds. Before 1979-80, overtime was all but impossible then. As players have become more proficient from 3, that's set up more overtime periods. Those two factors met up between 2000-01 and 2006-07, a span that produced the four times in NBA history 7% or more of games have gone to overtime.